Nigeria: Report - Nigeria Loses 72 Percent Internet Revenue To Us

Breaking! #Ads4nairaBlog.com
Latestnews
A research report conducted on the registration and use of the .ng
domain name this December by a web-hosting company, HUB8, shows huge
loss of revenue stream from Nigeria to the United States, as a result of
the number of business operating websites in Nigeria that are being
hosted and managed in the United States(US).

According to the
report, Nigeria is losing up to 72 per cent of the revenue it should be
generating from the hosting of such local websites that are currently
being hosted in the US.

The .ng domain name is Nigeria's
country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), which is the country's identity
in the cyberspace, but most businesses still prefer to register their
companies with foreign domain names, while those who decided to register
with the local .ng domain name, chose to host the website abroad, for
security reasons which bothers on fear of losing their data to hackers.

According
to the report, out of the 34,000 sites, less than 1,000 are located in
Nigeria, which is only 2.3 per cent of the total.

"The dominant
countries where site hosting often occurs were determined for the .ng
and .com.ng domains. The overwhelming number of sites are located in the
US (72 per cent)," translating into loss of 72 per cent hosting revenue
for Nigeria, according to the report.

This is coming just as
the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA), managers of the
country's domain names system (DNS) ecosystem, declared it has so far
registered 100,973 domains in .ng domain zone as at November 30, 2017.

Meanwhile,
HUB8 report was based on 89,165 domain names in the .ng domain zone
with particular focus on the details of the usage of .ng domains as it
relates to website hosting.

The report, however, does not include
data on premium domains (about 2,000) and some special domains that are
technically registered though not used by end users.

On the
distribution of the domain zones, the report revealed that most popular
domain zone is .com.ng, having almost 70 per cent of all national
domains registered.

The .ng domain zone, according to the report,
comes next although within the zone a domain name is shorter "but
domain registration here costs several times more than in .com.ng while
.org.ng, which is usually used by non-profit organisations, ranks third
with an age backlog.

"The number of zones identified by the
study include .com.ng; .ng; .org.ng; .gov.ng and .edu.ng with number of
domains being 61,609 (69.1 per cent); 15,353 (17.2 per cent); 6,077 (6.8
per cent); 1,738 (1.9 per cent and 996 (1.1 per cent) respectively,"
the report said.

Others such domain zones include .net.ng;
.name.ng; .sch.ng; .i.ng; .mobi.ng and .mil.ng, all which have less than
one per cent market share.

In terms of active websites, the HUB8
report noted that there are currently 38,864 websites in the .ng
domain, not including the sites that fail to open to the connection
timeout, redirects and the ones throwing an error (page is not found).
"The existing sites are hosted only in half of the .com.ng and one-third
of the .ng domains," the report said.

Commenting further on the
findings of the report, Director for Emerging Markets at HUB8, Mr.
Dmitry Deniskin, said often used Content Management System (CMS) was
detected in the existing websites, stating that the most popular CMS is
expected to be WordPress, being installed on every one in three sites in
the .ng and .com.ng domains.

"WordPress has a 78 per cent share
of all used CMS. Blogging is currently very popular in Nigeria: almost
1, 500 domains are affiliated with Blogger.com.

"Specialised CMS
utilised for e-commerce; such as Magento, Prestashop, Shopify,
WooCommerce, nopCommerce, oSCommerce and X-Cart use about 500 sites in
the .com.ng and .ng zones," Deniskin said.

To reverse the trend,
Deniskin said HUB8, which is a global web hosting company, would help
brands and individuals to easily set-up a website and host same in
Nigeria.

"Our ultimate goal is to become a growth partner for
individuals and small enterprises in emerging markets in Africa, Asia
and Latin America," he said.